South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “One at a time, Father. One at a time.”

  It was still early in the day when they got to Mary’s workshop, but she was already out there, dressed in work clothes and supervising three people as they arranged bundles and boxes around the tidy back lot between the pub and the workshop. Mary grinned when the three of them came walking up the lane and waved happily.

  “Your parts are back from the Inlet already,” she said.

  Rachel wandered in, her eyes skating across the various bundles and bales. “What is all this?”

  “Well, that pile of stuff is the netting you wanted cut. This pile of boxes here are the frame parts. That pile back there are cases of line floats and buoys, and these reels are the rope you need. There’s some other stuff around, too.” Mary grinned like a kid in a candy store.

  Jane McGill stood there with a box marked ‘toggles.’ “Where do you want this, Mary? Hi, Rachel,” she said.

  “Back there with the rest of the floats, Jane, thanks.”

  Rachel looked around and realized that Jane had brought her crew–Aaron Steward and Susan Marston–to help. “Thanks, Jane,” Rachel echoed a bit belatedly.

  Jane flashed a smile. “No problem. We were talking about it on the way in last night and figured it would be fun to see how this all worked.”

  Susan walked by with a bundle of netting and grinned at Otto as she passed. Rachel had to stifle a grin when she saw the devastating effect it had on him. When she noticed the way Susan’s walk changed slightly as she walked away toward the pile of netting, her thoughts took a more speculative–even motherly–turn.

  Mary laughed. “If I had a swing like that in my back yard, I’d never leave the house.”

  Richard, oblivious to the whole thing, said, “What?”

  Rachel coughed out a laugh. “Buckets? Mary? I’ve asked Otto to get a bucket of bait for us to use on the survey traps.”

  “Still there in the corner,” she pointed them out to Otto by first stepping into his line of sight to get his attention back from where Susan was bending over to put down her load of net parts. “Just take half a dozen. The lids are under the counter there.”

  “Half a dozen?” Rachel asked.

  “You’ll want them before you’re done and it’ll save time if you have them handy. You’re gonna go through an amazing amount of bait. You best get these great, strong men out there catching it for you soon.” Mary’s voice was mirthfully stern as she teased Otto and Richard.

  The two “great, strong men” set about untangling some of the buckets from the stack, which proved to be a much more difficult task than it might otherwise have seemed. The periodic distraction caused when Susan sashayed past the open doorway didn’t help.

  Mary said, “Sometimes you do better with little more subtlety on presentin’ the bait.”

  Rachel chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. She seems to be doing fine with the presentation she’s using.”

  A large lorry growled to a stop the end of the alley. Mary’s eyes took on a pinched look as the driver jumped down and strolled up to the back of the pub. He was a pleasantly tall man with big arms and shoulders. He his lips curved in a smile that showed his teeth, but Rachel didn’t think he looked particularly happy.

  “Hello, Pete. A little early this week, aren’t ya?” Mary said.

  He looked around at all the goods stacked about. “Little bit.”

  “I didn’t expect ya til tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Well. I’m here today, so you want this shipment or what?”

  “Oh, we have to have it. Can you gimme a couple minutes to clear a path?”

  Pete nodded to the back door of the pub. “Jace pullin’?”

  “We’re not open yet, Pete. You know that. Jace is still abed.”

  “Well.” Pete drew the word out. “I suppose I could wait a few minutes, but I got a schedule to keep.” He turned, ambled back down the alley, and climbed into the cab of his truck.

  “Jane? Aaron? Susan? We need to clear a path so the truck can back up to the door,” Mary went over to the nearest pile of gear and started shoving it along the ground.

  “Otto? Richard? If you’d leave those buckets for a moment?” Rachel said. “We could use some extra effort here.”

  They came out of the shed and soon had the gear shoved back out of the way against the wall.

  Mary motioned for Pete to back in, and they all stood back to watch. For all his attitude, Pete knew his business when it came to moving a large truck in a small space. It was soon filled the space between shop and pub.

  Rachel turned to Mary. “I’ll be right back. I need to talk to Alan.”

  Less than half a stan later, Rachel returned with Alan in tow. The truck still blocked the alley. Pete was taking his time moving the goods from the lorry, through the door and into the pub. Off to the side, the Pirano cargo tote sat half full of supplies for the crab pots. Richard and Otto had apparently taken off with their buckets, but Jane, Aaron, and Susan kept Mary company in the door of the shed.

  Alan nodded at Rachel. “Yeah. I see what you mean. Lemme go check to see what we have.” He turned and hurried away.

  Rachel joined the quartet at the shop door.

  Mary asked, “What’s that about, then?” She nodded in the direction that Alan had taken.

  “We can’t do this here, Mary. It’s not fair to you and Jace. You got a pub to run. These are gonna take up a lot of space when we get them going and you don’t have it.”

  She looked around, measuring the space and the bundles with her eyes. She sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. What’s Alan looking for?”

  “A building we can work in. Warehouse, maybe.”

  “The old boat house is empty,” Mary said. “Has been for stanyers.”

  Rachel grinned. “I asked for that one first. He has to see if it’s available or if he has anything better.”

  Mary grinned back and they stepped out of the shop, walked down beside the wall and stepped into the backside of the lot behind the pub. The ramshackle metal building hunkered at the front of the large lot. The back of the lot was just scrubbly dirt and the odd bit of rotting timber on the ground. Before Pirano had built the new hoist and wintering facility down on the harbor side, this place had been the wintering yard for the fleet—all twelve boats of it. Rachel’s eye went to the spot where her father’s boat had wintered for so many stanyers. It looked no different than any other, but the ghosts of the twelve huge boats floated there in her mind’s eye, the chocks and cradles locking the hulls into their winter embrace, winter wind sizzling across the surface of the boat-wrap. She used to think they looked like huge cocoons. She’d always fancied they’d emerge in the spring as gigantic butterflies.

  “Plenty of room back here to stack traps,” Mary said.

  They picked their way across the uneven ground until they got to the front of the building. A chain and padlock through the hoops of the door handles held the sliding doors closed, but the window beside the door was missing entirely, allowing the wind and weather–along with the two women–clear access into the building. The cavernous building was five meters up, fifteen meters wide, and ten deep. The big work benches still hung against the west wall. The big overhead gantry crane was gone, of course, but the heavy rail on which it had run was still there. The roof looked mostly intact. There were only a couple of places where a missing rivet allowed a narrow beam of sun to shine in. The floor was, of course, a wreck.

  Mary stood there in the middle of the leaf litter and bits of brick-a-brack on the floor, put her hands on her hips, and surveyed the ruin. “This is a mess.”

  Rachel turned in place beside her, looking around and around, beaming a huge smile. “This is perfect.”

  Alan stuck his head in the broken window. “Good, because it’s about the only thing we have on the asset list that’s available today.” He eyed the broken out window then used the keys dangling from his fingers to unlock the padlock, and open the double front doors wide. The additional lig
ht showed off the water stains, rust, and corrosion to good effect. The windows, where they survived, were fogged with grime and small spots best not investigated too closely. He shook his head as he stepped gingerly across the littered floor. “I don’t know, Rachel. Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s perfect. Lots of room under cover to work. Plenty of space in the back for stacking pots. Can we get the back doors open?”

  She walked over to the middle of the back wall and found the catches, pulling down on the chain to release the top bolt and pulling up on the lever to slip the bottom. She put her weight behind the handle and shoved the huge door sideways along its track. It squealed along the track for a couple of meters before fetching up on the loose trash on the floor. Alan and Mary had freed the other door and it rolled back to its stops, flooding the interior with light for the first time in more than a decade.

  “Yup,” Rachel said. “Perfect.”

  Chapter Forty

  Aram’s Inlet

  April 15, 2305

  Sitting that close to nothing and eight kilometers in the air was too much for Casey. She sat in the back seat and let Jimmy have the cockpit view. It didn’t seem to bother him. They’d taken off just before the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and Sonya took them almost straight up until they’d reached cruising altitude. She turned the flitter so that the clear golden sun on the horizon was straight out the port side window and pushed the throttles to the stops. Other than a faint keening as the wind screamed over the outside surfaces, the inside was relatively quiet.

  Casey settled back into the seat, watching the flat panel of water below. They flew over the headland and out over the ocean so quickly, that Casey only got a quick glimpse of the boats working the Ole Man’s Bank off to starboard before they were alone, pale green sky above, dark green sea below. It was easy for her to think they were just they were hung there, not moving. The warmth of the flitter and the low murmurs from the front as they discussed positions, scans, and the state of the art in remote sensing soon lulled her into a light doze.

  Some subtle shift in the flitter woke her to see Sonya and Jimmy both looking straight down and Casey saw the horizon shifting upwards just slightly as they began their hover down to the water. Without a boat or something to give scale, it was difficult to deal with what her eyes were telling her. Suddenly, they were low enough and the sense of it snapped into focus. Low, smooth waves rolled across the water only a few meters below them. There was a stippling on the surface that she recognized as wind ripple.

  Sonya said, “Local wind speed twelve kilometers per hour from the south-west. Ambient air temperature twenty-six cee. A nice day for a fly-by.”

  On the console between the two front seats, Sonya brought up a map grid with satellite false color imagery overlays. “Okay, we’re right in the middle of the ridge.” On another screen she brought up a bottom scan. “That’s a five kilometer ring around us. We’ll record a strip at a time as we go.” She pointed the flitter west and began the survey.

  Jimmy looked at Casey over his shoulder and pointed to the bottom finder. “It’s not flat, but it’s flat enough for trawling,” he said.

  The screen was a uniform color with subtle shadings indicating slight variations in depth. Casey couldn’t be sure reading the unfamiliar instruments, but it looked like it might be much flatter than even Pumpkin Grounds. The bottom ran slightly up and down but stayed right around eighty-five meters. They didn’t seem to be moving too fast, but in a matter of a few ticks, Sonya said, “Okay, first twenty kilometer scan, turning ninety degrees north for seven.” The horizon spun as the sun’s direction through the canopy changed. They flew north for only a very short time before Sonya said, “Turning ninety degrees east, beginning second twenty kilometer scan.” In just a few ticks, they’d completed the back track and Sonya turned south, running a parallel track seven kilometers south of the original track. They made three more of these boxed passes when they found the mount.

  Up until that point, Casey wondered what she was there for. When the false color image showed a nearly sudden break in color edging in from the north east, she almost squeaked. The bottom had been so uniformly colored that the change was that much more startling. “Is that up or down?” she asked.

  “Up, and a long way up,” Sonya said.

  The scan revealed the southern edge of an underwater plateau sitting on the ridge. The edge disappeared back off the edge of the screen after a couple of kilometers, but it prompted a hurried consultation between Jimmy and Sonya.

  They finished their eastward pass, but instead of turning south, they turned north and made another pass on the same side of the box. The plateau cut all the way across their path. Casey could make out the reverse look of the edge they’d passed on the way east because of the two kilometer overlap. As they passed slowly over the top of it, it became apparent that it was roughly ovoid, three kilometers across on the north-south axis and five kilometers east-west. Casey looked out the windows and almost expected to see it under them. The top of the plateau was only twenty-three meters below the surface.

  Sonya said, “It’s probably the basalt plug from some really old volcano. Volcanoes are not uncommon on the plate fault lines and the convergent plate boundaries here just lifted it up a little closer to the surface.”

  “Why does it have such steep sides?” Jimmy asked.

  “The rock around it is much softer. It wore away quicker, leaving just that plug of basalt sticking up out of the bottom. I’ll bet there are more of them along the ridge,” Sonya said.

  “Will they be a problem for fishing around?” Casey asked her.

  Sonya shrugged. “They’re too deep to worry a hull, and not all that common that you won’t have them all identified on charts in a matter of days once you set up out here.”

  They were coming to the end of their leg and Sonya said, “Okay, Jimmy, we’re down to about half a stan before we have to go back. We’ve got time for a quick peek at the fish stocks before we leave, or we can go back and look that plateau over a little more.”

  “Fish stocks,” Jimmy said without an iota of hesitation. “We got bottoms, we got a potential anchorage, and now we need to know if we have fish.”

  Sonya grinned and reached down to pull a release lever that caused a thunk under the belly of the flitter. There was a whining sound that reverberated through the frame, and when it stopped, the bottom screen changed image from the solid colored picture showing the bottom contours to a more familiar sonar fish finder view.

  “How are you getting that?” Casey asked.

  “Just lowered the sonar transponder into the water,” Sonya said. “We’ll tow for a few ticks so you and Jimmy can see what’s there in terms of sea life.”

  She turned the flitter on a south easterly direction to cut diagonally across the bottoms that that they’d just surveyed. Jimmy and Casey stared at the graphs unreeling on the screen. Every once in a while some particularly dense school would show up on the bottom and Jimmy would point it out to Casey in his excitement.

  After just a few ticks, Jimmy said, “Okay, I’ve seen enough. How about you, Casey?”

  “Yeah, that’s amazing. Nothing like pristine fishing grounds to make you realize how close to the edge ours are.”

  Sonya slowed the forward velocity and reeled in the sonar probe until it cla-clunked into its compartment under the flitter. In a tick, the doors were closed and the flitter turned northward, beginning its climb up to cruising altitude for the long run back to The Inlet.

  All the way back, Jimmy and Casey discussed the logistics of how to get ten draggers working in the area immediately around that undersea plateau. They had very good charts of a fifteen by twenty kilometer region of the undersea ridge top. They replayed the recording of the sonar run several times on the way back, each time noticing something different. The stumbling block was always how to get the fish back to shore in a timely manner.

  The trip back took exactly the same amount of time as the
trip out, but somehow it didn’t seem as long to Casey. As they slid in over the coastline and began their descent into the flitter park at Aram’s Inlet, Sonya got pulled into the conversation, too. After they landed and finally stepped down out of the flitter, stretching and wincing in some cases, Sonya asked, “So the problem is what to do with the fish?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “It’s pretty clear that we’ll be able to catch them. We can even process them, but then what? We need to get them out of there really fast because otherwise they’ll start backing up on us.”

  “Well, why don’t you just build a shuttle pad and take them straight up to orbit?” she asked.

  Casey and Jimmy stared at each other in slack jawed amazement.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Callum’s Cove

  April 20, 2305

  Rachel grinned as she walked up to the front of the building. Some wag had put up a rough sign proclaiming “Krugg’s Krabs!” and “Open for Business.”

  “Not exactly,” she said to herself. She swung open the double doors and looked at the stacks of crab pots. “Soon, though.”

  She crossed the floor, released the catches, and put her shoulder to one of the large back doors. The morning light flooded the dim interior and showed just how much a few people could do in a short period of time. The floor had been washed, not just swept but power-hosed clean after the worst of the detritus had been picked up and tossed into a rubbish container. The bundles and cases of crab pot parts were largely gone now, but the assembly line they’d created had turned the pile of pieces into a hundred crab pots in a matter of hours. The keg of beer from The Gurry Butt had something to do with the onslaught of volunteers. With half the fleet tied up on any given day, there were a lot of people around to help and the project was the talk of the town, supplanting even landing quotas as a source of speculation and amusement.

  Rachel grabbed the front stack of pots and started to drag it toward the big doors. For their first survey, she’d decided on dropping ten of the pots in various locations around the harbor. Alan had provided the company utility launch as fishing platform while the yard at the Inlet finished building her the custom designed boat. She and Mary had spent a giddy afternoon sketching out their specifications on a standard ten meter utility boat design template. The giddiness was partly excitement and partly the bottle of single malt, but it had been fun. Alan forwarded the design to Jake and they expected the new boat any day.